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Kosovo party injects humour into polls

Vince Chadwick

Promises for the people: Visar Arifaj and supporters in Pristina, Kosovo, on Sunday. Photo: Vince Chadwick

Pristina: If the 26-year-old graphic designer Visar Arifaj is elected as a councillor in Kosovo’s municipal elections, which were held on Sunday, he promises to always make promises.

Among them: building a highway straight through the national library, putting urinals in the foyer of public buildings, using stray dogs for public transport, bringing a Formula One race to the capital Pristina, and creating 62,000 new jobs.

Partia e Forte (The Strong Party) is a spoof political movement formed two years ago by some friends in a bar that is proving that some things are too important to take seriously.

“Let’s be honest, everyone felt offended by politics until today because [politicians] treat you like you’re a moron,” Mr Arifaj says.

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Today the Strong Party consists of about 20 organisers, 1500 vice-presidents – the party’s name for its members – and more than 73,000 Facebook supporters. It is inspired in part by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

“We sort of infiltrated politics by fooling with it, and by not directly opposing it there was a completely different reaction,” Mr Arifaj says.

One week after the Strong Party jokingly promised to create 12,000 new jobs, a rival candidate seriously proposed 20,000. “We had to react to it by raising the bar to 62,000, because come on!”

For Mr Arifaj, making fun of politicians proves their fallibility: “It gives people hope that we can actually make some change.”

With a budget of €2500 ($3570), the Strong Party is only running in the municipality of Pristina, but it has attracted wide support and may field candidates in the general election next year.

Notoriously unreliable polls are giving it between 2 and 18 per cent of the vote, and Mr Arifaj predicts they will get five of the 51 seats.

So what will separate the spoof policies from the real ones? The line is already beginning to blur.

“We were talking about green areas . . . and I said we should invest in vertical gardening,” Mr Arifaj says. “The other candidates just laughed. And it’s a shame that they don’t do just a little bit of research because that’s all it takes to see how vertical gardening is a very common thing in the developed world.”

At 1am on Sunday morning, Mr Arifaj sat on Pristina’s main boulevard accepting the best wishes of passers-by. A young woman yelled that her mum would be voting for him, while a man teased that the candidate might not be seen out so late once he is elected mayor of Pristina.